The Hills of Home
by vanillafluffy
Summary: Past. Backstory. History. Who is Bobby Singer, and where does he come from? How did he get into hunting? Here are the answers, told by the person who knows him best in the world. posted prior to Dream a Little Dream.


**The Hills of Home**

Out in the dooryard, some of the grandbabies are playing, the sweet sound of their laughter overlaying the gentle creak of the rocking chair. In another couple years, the youngest great-grandbabies will join them, scampering through the stand of pine and gathering hickory nuts as their daddies and grand-daddies had years back.

"You got a postcard, Ma," says her oldest son, his bootsteps echoing on the plank floor of the porch. The elderly woman arranges the crocheting in her lap and stretches out a gnarled hand for the colored rectangle. "It's Mount Rushmore."

Rachel squints at it. Her eyes aren't so good any more. She makes out that it's grey and blue with a streak of yellow, but it's a fuzzy blur and forget trying to read the hen-scratch on the other side. 

"Best you read it to me," she says after a moment. She doesn't need to be able to read to know who it's from---her youngest son, gone these two years after the tragedy.

It doesn't surprise her that he's written, even though he knows full well she never made it past fourth grade. He's always been one for books, has her baby. Takes after his daddy that way, except her Claude heard the call to preach. Got called all the way to a little shanty church in Oklahoma that about dried up and blew away during the Dust Bowl. Hard times, and them with four boys to raise.

That was the only time in their marriage Rachel ever stood up to her husband, threatening to take the boys and go back to Georgia, with him or without. If it had been just the two of them, she mightn't have said anything, but she couldn't abide seeing Emmett and the twins growing thinner and more hollow-eyed by the day, and herself barely making milk for little Toby.

When they got back, Claude took a job at the quarry---plenty of work there, hauling out stone for WPA buildings---and it had been more than a decade before her baby boy came along, surprising her when she thought she was going through the change. He'd been hers in a way the older ones hadn't. Not as boisterous as his older brothers, he'd consumed schooling like it was as important as food or breathing.

She'd never forget the time he'd come running in with a book full of photographs, pointing to one with her picture. "Faces of the Great Depression" was the title of the book, and she knew to the hour when that picture had been taken, her sitting on the running board at the gas station as they made their defeated way home from Oklahoma. Claude had been muttering about the fearful cost of gas---it was nine cents a gallon---and the boys were playing tag to work off all their energy, because sitting still in the old Dodge wasn't like sitting still in church, and they were whooping like a bunch of wild Indians.

He was as pleased as she'd ever seen him, proud that his mama was in a book, like she was a movie star or something, although it didn't have her name anywhere, and she was thankful for that. To Rachel's way of thinking, it was nothing to be glad about, but then, he was the baby, and maybe the older ones remembered that long trek back as something of an adventure, but she and Claude had known the truth: it was failure. They had to go home, that place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Her late-in-life son, her gift from God, had grown up, as boys do, and he'd gone to war, as young men will. Letters came, not with any regularity, but enough to attest to his continued survival. She remembered, in particular, one where he talked about how green the jungle was---"as green as the hills of home," he wrote, "but without the hills."

When he'd returned a couple years later, he stood taller, but he was even quieter. He'd turned moody. She feared for him, helling through the hills in that big black Chevy he'd bought with his combat pay. It grieved her in her heart to see her dear baby boy so damaged, lashing out, looking for fights. Claude had passed on by then, preaching to the choir, no doubt, so she'd turned to her older brother for guidance.

Amos had taken him on as an apprentice, hunting things that were dark and frightful, and said the boy had a talent for it. Took him into his house, too, because the coming and going at all hours in her house was not going to work, not when his oldest brother and wife had two young'uns trying to sleep.

Linnet Cooper was a fox-faced little thing, not who Rachel would've picked for a daughter-in-law.

Odd folks, the Coopers, so it made her uneasy the afternoon she spied her youngest son out with the girl. The church picnic had been interrupted by a brief, fierce downpour, and the two of them had sauntered out from behind the tool-shed near the parsonage after the rain moved on, Linnet walking funny, as if... Her baby boy was a grown man, she had to remind herself. And that's what men do.

There wasn't much she could say; maybe there'd be a few grandbabies out of it. She had a passel of them from the older boys, so why not admit she's gone from being Mama to being Memaw?

It was Linnet's great-aunt Jerusha who'd raised her. She'd learned to help the old woman make herbal concoctions for the folks who favored them over store-bought medicines. In addition to nursing the sick, Jerusha was tacitly known to be the woman to go to if a gal was in trouble. She made a tea…Rachel still remembered the bitter taste off it…there would've been another handful of babies, if she hadn't visited the herb woman. It plagued her conscience sometimes, wondering if maybe she might've had a daughter to balance out all those boys.

On a Saturday evening, as she sat mending a torn cuff on his good Sunday shirt, he settled gingerly onto the nearby horsehair sofa. "Mama, it's me and Linnet. We're gettin' up in front of the preacher tomorrow after the service and gettin' married."

She didn't say anything. Any hitching done that sudden-like was bound to have the oldest reason in the world behind it.

"Just thought you ought to know," he said finally, and started to get up.

"Not so fast, you," she snapped, and she'd trained him well enough that he stopped. "Where are you fixin' to park your little bride, answer me that?" She couldn't see Amos welcoming a bride into his perpetual bachelorhood, Emmett and his wife and their young'uns were already straining her own small house at the seams, and she had no desire to invite a Cooper into the mix.

"That cabin that used to be Darnell's, up by Amos's. The roof is tight and the well is good. I got the stove to work, and Deke's gonna give me his old icebox. We'll make do." His chin came up a little, and she reckoned that he came by that pride from her; Claude had been too saintly by half for such a thing.

"You got a baby on the way?"

Just then, his face wore the most foolish expression she ever saw on it. Sheepish as any man whose pecker has gotten him in trouble, but with a grin twitching the corners of his mouth, no shame in him. She reckoned that all things considered, it was better they wed than resort to Jerusha's bitter tonic.

It wasn't quite seven months later when Linnet bore him a son, The look on his face that day was pride and love, and if her doubts about his maturity had lasted that long, they were gone when she read the faint knotting of his brow that meant he felt the responsibility of having a family. Rachel didn't care over-much for her in-laws, but her grandson was a precious little mite.

With a family to support, he didn't go hunting with Amos so often. Instead, he got a job in the service department at Cousin Riley's farm equipment dealership. Still, kin was kin. When his mother-in-law said something strange was prowling around Cooper's Ridge, he and Amos went a-hunting. They were stalking it that windy night on the cusp betwixt March and April when the little cabin that used to be Darnell's caught fire somehow and burned to the ground.

Gone was sharp-faced Linnet, gone was the little angel who was with them a scant six months. If Rachel's heart was broken, it's nothing to the wild grief she read in her baby boy's eyes. Her grown sons are all well and grown, his tiny child has died. She couldn't imagine, didn't want to imagine how that felt.

There was a funeral held: no bodies to bury, so it was a short, sad memorial. Jerusha was tight-lipped and dry-eyed. If she grieved, she did it privately. A modest insurance policy was more than enough for a double headstone. The survivor stood on the steps of the Church of the Good Shepherd, gazing up the hill toward the blackened scar amid greening spring branches. He didn't seem to hear the murmured condolences of the community, but no one faulted him.

Before the week was out, he'd packed up the suit of clothes he'd worn to the funeral, the hand-me-downs he'd been given to tide him over during the days when he had only the clothes on his back, and he drove away in the big, black Chevelle that had brought him there.

It's been two years. This card is the first word she's had from him. "Read it," she says again to Emmett.

"Dear Mama, I have been a real rolling stone and I'm sorry I haven't written before this. I think about you and the homefolks every day, but I don't know if I can ever bear to come back. Tell Uncle Amos I've been using the knowledge he taught me. It isn't just in the hills that people have trouble with spirits and haunts.

"I met a man who was fixing to lose his place for taxes, so I bought him out and now I have my own business. It's a glorified junkyard here in the Black Hills of South Dakota. I tried living without mountains, but I just couldn't do it. These are different enough from the hills of home that I can admire them without hurting so much.

"I hope you are all well.

"Your loving son,

"Bobby"

* * *

Feedback is shiny.


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